Kill Anything That Moves. The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse

Author:Nick Turse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Military History, Non fiction
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

7

WHERE HAVE ALL THE WAR CRIMES GONE?

Throughout the early years of the Vietnam War, civilian suffering was everywhere and yet nowhere in the American media. News reports described thousands of incidents that violated the laws of war, but usually skipped blithely past the implications, neither labeling nor acknowledging the crimes.1 And for every war crime that was mentioned in a newspaper or magazine, a mass of other evidence was covered up in the field or kept secret at higher command levels.

The secrecy went all the way up to the Pentagon. In 1967, for instance, after some newspaper reports about atrocities committed in Vietnam by members of the Special Forces, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara commissioned an inquiry to find out how well U.S. troops understood the Geneva Conventions. A team of agents headed by W. Donald Stewart, the chief of the Pentagon’s Investigations Division for the Directorate of Inspection Services, compiled a 208-page report with shocking implications. More than 96 percent of the Marine Corps second lieutenants they surveyed, for example, indicated that they would resort to torture to obtain information. “I came back from South Vietnam thinking that things were out of control,” Stewart recalled years later. But he knew that his findings “wouldn’t have been good for the political image” of the military or the president, and the Pentagon certainly agreed. A high-ranking Defense Department official ordered the report to be placed in “review status,” a form of bureaucratic limbo meant to kill it. Its findings were never made public.2

As time went on, though, some cover-ups began to crumble. In August 1969, after their elaborate scheme unraveled, seven members of the Special Forces were implicated in the torture and killing of the intelligence operative Thai Khac Chuyen. Whispers circulated about CIA involvement in the case, and the “Green Beret Affair” made the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report.3 Soon, articles began to probe the Phoenix program, the agency’s role in targeted killings, and, as the celebrated Washington Post reporter Ward Just put it, other “dirty business Americans have undertaken in this war.”4 This flurry of revelations would be short-lived, however; within a few weeks, under pressure from the CIA and the White House, Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor dismissed all charges against the Green Berets, foreclosing any possibility that further sordid details—including a dossier of CIA and Special Forces’ assassinations put together by the defendants—might be entered into evidence in a courtroom.5

August 1969 also saw the publication of Normand Poirier’s chilling Esquire article “An American Atrocity,” which used military legal documents to reconstruct the 1966 rampage of U.S. Marines through the hamlet of Xuan Ngoc—including the gang-rape of eighteen-year-old Bui Thi Huong and the slaughter of her family. (The magazine sent proofs of the story to every major newspaper in the country, hoping to generate attention, but none showed the slightest interest.)6 A few months later, in October 1969, the New Yorker published Daniel Lang’s harrowing account of the 1966 kidnapping, gang-rape, and murder of Phan Thi Mao by an army patrol in II Corps.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.